Fascinating wildlife…

Menu

Tag Archives: Water horsetail

A few decades ago the whoopers swan (Cygnus cygnus) was an endangered and rare species in Finland. It only bred in remote lakes and people rarely saw them. The population increase of whooper swans after protection is one of the success stories in Finnish nature conservation. Nowadays the swans can be heard gaggling all around Finland. The whooper swan is a large bird, and it thus consumes a lot of vegetation. Water horsetail (Equisetum fluviatile) is one of its favourites.

The whooper swan population has increased greatly, and their gaggling can be heard widely in Finland.

Certain other species also prefer water horsetails. For example, wigeon (Mareca penelope) broods forage within the horsetail growths searching for emerging invertebrates. A study published earlier this year showed that the water horsetail is disappearing from Finnish and Swedish lakes. The reasons for this pattern are unknown, but one possible explanation could be increased grazing pressure. Whooper swans effectively utilize horsetails, and swan grazing was therefore suspected to be influencing the disappearance of the horsetail. Wigeon populations have concurrently shown a worrying decrease.

A recently published study conducted of 60 Finnish and Swedish lakes utilized vegetation and waterbird data gathered in the early 1990s and in 2016. The study area widely covers the boreal, reaching from southern Sweden to Finnish Lapland. The whooper swan population increased strongly during the study period. Researchers studied whether whooper swans’ grazing on water horsetail is causing the negative trend in the wigeon population. Pair counts were used to indicate waterbird communities, and thus any changes caused during the brood time were not shown.

Whooper swans are grazers that have to consume a great deal of vegetation to survive.

The study showed that whooper swans strongly preferred lakes with horsetails during the 1990s, but this connections is not seen anymore. While the number of swan-occupied lakes has increased, the number of horsetail lakes has decreased dramatically. However, it appears that swans and disappearing horsetails do not associate, because the horsetail has also been from lakes where swans don’t occur. The horsetail has increased in some swan-occupied lakes.

The number of lakes used by wigeon has decreased, but swans are apparently not causing this. Wigeon loss has not been stronger on lakes occupied by swans. Quite the opposite, as wigeons and swans appear to positively correlate. Even though wigeons prefer horsetail lakes, their disappearance is not associated with the horsetail loss occurring in the study lakes, which suggests that wigeons can also utilize other lake types. On the other hand, the researchers note that this study did not considered the critical brood time, when the foraging opportunities among the horsetail growths are especially important. Thus it may still be possible that wigeons are affected by horsetail loss, but this effect only appears during the brood time.

Over 20 years ago Finnish and Swedish duck researchers began the “Northern Project” and conducted vegetation measurements on 60 Finnish and Swedish lakes while also counting their duck populations. The study lakes were located from southern Sweden and Finland to Lapland in both countries. Researchers found that the water horsetail (Equisetum fluviatile) grew abundantly on many of the study lakes. Breeding Eurasian wigeons (Anas penelope) were also abundant according to the study.

The water horsetail prefers eutrophic lakes and wetlands. Horsetails are an ancient plant group that has existed for over 100 million years. They are thus living fossils.

Wigeons also utilize eutrophic lakes during the breeding season. Adults are vegetarians, but wigeon ducklings also consume invertebrates, a common trait in young birds.

The vegetation mappings and duck surveys connected to the Northern Project were repeated in 2013–2014. The researchers wished to find reasons for the deep decline in breeding wigeon numbers. They observed that wigeons had disappeared from several lakes where they were found on 20 years ago. When the habitat use of wigeon pairs was studied, the pairs were observed to particularly prefer lakes with water horsetails. In Evo, southern Finland, the feeding habitats of wigeon broods were followed over a period of 20 years. Broods were found to forage significantly more often within water horsetails than in other vegetation.

Wigeons therefore prefer lakes with water horsetail present throughout their breeding season. However, the long-term research by the Northern Project has shown that water horsetail has declined and even disappeared from many lakes in Sweden and Finland: this is a large-scale phenomenon. The wigeon is suspected to suffer due to vanishing water horsetail populations. Also, Finnish pair surveys in addition to reproduction monitoring show negative trends for the wigeon.

The reasons behind diminishing water horsetail numbers are not known. Impact from alien species can be suspected locally. Glyceria maxima, an alien species in Finland, appears to be growing in areas were water horsetail has traditionally grown. Grazing by the muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) could also be a reason, but the species does not occur in southern Sweden. The whooper swan (Cygnus cygnus) could be another potential grazer, and the species’ populations have rapidly increased during the last decades. But these species can only have local effects, which do no not apply to the whole study area. Researchers cannot exclude other possible explanations, for example diseases or changes in water ecosystems. Despite water horsetail having commonly existed in boreal lakes, their influence in the water ecosystem is poorly understood. This study suggests that the water horsetail has an important role, and its disappearance will be reflected in the food web.